Twice as many homes sell just under £300,000 as just over it

Research by ValuQ: we analysed exact completed sale prices in HM Land Registry's Price Paid data, comparing 2024 with sales completed after the stamp duty bands changed on 1 April 2025, to measure how hard buyers and sellers steer around tax thresholds.

ValuQ Property Watch. Since 1 April 2025, a first-time buyer pays no stamp duty up to £300,000 and 5% on the portion above it. That tax line is now visible in the completed sales record as a physical feature of the market: a pile-up of transactions just beneath it, and a thin stretch of no-man's-land just above.

How big is the £300,000 wall?

Since April 2025, 9,616 homes have completed at prices from £295,001 to £300,000, against 4,652 at £300,001 to £305,000. That is a ratio of 2.07: for every home that sells just over the line, two sell just under it. In 2024, before the first-time buyer threshold moved down from £425,000, the same ratio at £300,000 was 1.95. The wall existed, because £300,000 is also a powerful round number, but the tax change has hardened it.

The £300,000 to £304,999 band looks busy only because of one price: a large spike of sales at exactly £300,000, the last pound a first-time buyer can pay without owing any duty. Strip the exact-threshold sales out and the picture is a cliff: the £305,000 band is the thinnest £5,000 stretch anywhere between £270,000 and £330,000.

What is the most common price paid for a home?

Exactly £250,000. It has been the single most common completed price in both periods we measured: 9,049 sales in 2024 and 7,811 since April 2025. £300,000 is second in both. Round numbers and tax lines, not smooth market pricing, decide where thousands of British sales land.

One ghost remains in the data: £425,000, the old first-time buyer threshold, still shows clear bunching even though the relief moved away from it more than a year ago. Old tax lines, like old habits, fade slowly.

What should you do if your home is worth just over £300,000?

A stamp duty threshold is a step in the buyer's total cost. A first-time buyer paying £305,000 owes £250 in duty; at £310,000, £500; at £320,000, £1,000. Small sums on paper, but the psychology is bigger than the arithmetic: crossing the line at all moves your home out of the search bracket of buyers who have capped their search at £300,000, and the completed sales show how many transactions that costs.

• If the evidence says your home is worth £300,000 to £310,000, a price at or just under £300,000 can reach the first-time buyer wave and create competition that a £307,500 asking price never sees.
• If your home is comfortably worth more, do not shade down into the wall out of nerves; the £310,000-plus bands trade normally.
• Buyers: a home asking £305,000 to £310,000 is sitting in the thinnest part of the market, which is negotiating information worth having.

Thousands of sellers are pricing into a dead zone without knowing it exists. The market is not smooth; it has walls, and the sales record shows exactly where they stand.

That quote is from Evren Ergin, founder of ValuQ, commenting on the findings. How we did this: ValuQ analysed HM Land Registry Price Paid data (category A market sales of houses and flats, England and Wales). We compared the calendar year 2024 with completed sales from 1 April 2025 to 30 April 2026, counted exact sale prices and £5,000 price bands around the current and former first-time buyer thresholds, and computed the ratio of sales in the £5,000 immediately below each threshold to the £5,000 immediately above it. Completion dates lag agreed sales by two to three months, so the post-April-2025 window overwhelmingly reflects deals struck under the new bands.

Where your home sits relative to the wall is a question about its real market value, not its round-number value. ValuQ is a platform that gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents, so you can see where the evidence puts your home before you choose a price. Free, always, for homeowners.